Literary Erotica and Erotic Art

For millenia, artists, poets, writers and sculptors have expressed their joyous experience of ecstatic sex through their artistic creations. More recently, photographers and filmmakers have added their appreciations of ecstatic sex.

Experiencing erotic visual art or reading fiction that celebrates ecstatic sex can be profound ways to learn about sexuality and to incorporate some of the artist’s sense of ecstasy. In the Sixties, the phrase “contact high” referred to the experience of feeling high just by being around someone else who had actually ingested a psychoactive substance.

Artistic expressions of the erotic date back many thousands of years, to cave paintings and crude sketches scratched into bone. These images celebrated fecund females and erect penises — representations of Eros and the power of sex to create new life.

The first recorded literary work, The Epic of Gilgamesh, dating to 2000 BC, contains a number of descriptions of erotic encounters, as does the Hebrew Bible.